Einstein was a smart guy, maybe the smartest guy ever. So when he said that the disappearance of bees would lead, within four years, to the disappearance of humans, people took notice.
"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live."
Problem is, the famed physicist never said it.
With colony collapse disorder leading to unexplained and sometimes dramatic declines in commercial bee colonies in 35 states, that didn’t stop the frequent recycling of the quote, which was first written down about 40 years after his death in 1955.
“You can’t always go by an absence of proof is proof of absence kind of thing. But with someone who is as well documented as Einstein, who lived in the 20th century, everything he said is pretty well documented and collated,” said David Mikkelson, who runs the urban myth-debunking Web site Snopes.com with his wife.
Like many a quote, Mikkelson said, this one appears to have been attributed to Einstein to lend it an air of authority. As it happens, there’s a grain of truth to the apocryphal quote, and the apocalyptic overtones aren’t far off the mark.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmen ... stein-bees